When I opened the KAIST admissions results page on one fine spring morning in 2017 to find out that I was to spend a minimum of four years in an unknown land called Daejeon in the unfamiliar country of Korea, my mother, who had wished so dearly that I would one day settle in her familiar world so that I may “learn my roots”, advised me that I was not to count on anyone to look after me but myself as she sent me off into adulthood since she was sure I was soon to spend a hectic year drowned in quizzes, exams, alcohol, starts and ends of relationships, hangovers, and friendship dramas, and was concerned that I may start crumbling down even with the smallest of external stimuli such as Hubo crashing into a wall or from realizing that I would never be exempt from a single Physics I recitation session, because these things can make one wonder whether they are in the right place;

but to my mother’s disappointment, I was sure I was already screwing things up, like choosing a major based on a process of elimination without putting much thought into what “Materials Science and Engineering” really meant (though to be completely honest, I am still unable to coin a clear and concise description of what it consists of after three and a half years) and spending more time agonizing about all the things I had to get done rather than actually doing them, while everyone else seemed to know what they were doing, with some already working at labs or starting a business and others making the most of their university lives in their own ways, while I sat in my room, counting down the number of semesters I had left to make amends and straighten out my life,

which is not an easy thing if you’re the kind of person that does not know the difference between being “productive” and “busy” — I was unfortunately quite exactly that kind of person in junior year, when, on top of the four part-time jobs I took to afford a life and a plane ticket, I decided to take five major courses and two leadership roles in two different clubs, because I, for some reason, believed that being busier than anyone could prove to myself that I was doing something right when I had already learned so clearly from my earlier years in KAIST that effort does not necessarily correlate directly with fruitfulness, and I was once again to find myself without anything at the end of the semester but two classes I had to retake,

by which point I had to admit that there were things I just couldn’t manage to juggle all at once, especially when I was ten thousand kilometers from home during a pandemic, and was still an in-betweener that did not belong entirely in Korea but was neither so international enough of a student to receive the school’s attention and support, which is why walking down the ghosted campus reminded me of one of my earlier Chuseoks here when DDDN held a free pizza giveaway for students who did not have a home to go back to for the holidays but rejected me because I was not a foreigner,

but this is just how I learned to eventually be able to look out for myself, to appreciate the people I went through thick and thin with, to not expect much from an institution, but remember even the smallest positive things, like sledding down the snow-fallen hill next to Sports Complex on a plastic bag, cycling along Gapcheon in the autumn, walking up the Endless Road drunk, falling asleep in the ACC, picnicking under the cherry blossom trees, and snacking at maejeom past midnight, because paradoxically, they shine brighter than ever through what I still think is the most boring four-point-five years of my life.

And this is why, when I opened the KAIST graduate school admissions results page to find out that I was to spend a minimum of two more years in this familiar land of Daejeon, though I couldn’t be blindly happy when thinking about what more there was to come, I was strangely glad to be able to spend a little more time in this sh*thole I love and hate.